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Everything posted by Mole
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Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
I used NIV above with “God-breathed.“ Other versions I find use “inspired by,” “breathed life into,” “divinely inspired,” “given by inspiration,” and “breathed out by God.” I’m not personally inclined to come up with any meaningful difference in meaning. There may be some pastor somewhere that thinks I’m a heathen because I find “God-breathed” most compelling and memorable. Churches have split over more pedantic reasons. I’m not going to pretend that I can explain or even know the nuances of whatever Greek phrase that was used. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
1. That “Word” isn’t typically understood to be the Bible or scripture but rather Jesus. It’s a beautifully poetic passage. This Word gets conflated with the Bible as the word of God idea all the time. 2. The closest that I can come up with for the Bible claiming to be the word of God is 2 Timothy 3:16-17: All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Whether “God-breathed” is the same thing as “word of God” and what that means for different interpretations and degrees of in inerrancy is a good question I guess. “God-breathed” doesn’t have to mean literally and historically accurate, since 21st century people interpret the idea accuracy differently than ancient people would have. -
Yes, it’s quite plainly cheating to cut and paste your writing prompt into Chat GPT, ask it to make a few edits — mostly to hide your cheating — and then turn it in with your name on it. It’s not that different than copying some article you found on the internet, running it through some thesaurus machine — rendering it both incomprehensible but also making it much harder to track down the source material — and turning it in with your name on it. You didn’t write it and those aren’t your ideas. I have played with the oral defense of all term papers idea precisely because I know that the students using these tools don’t understand the papers they are turning in. Grammarly is essentially a nosy editor looking over your shoulder, giving style and grammar recommendations. The Microsoft/Google autocomplete tool is trying to guess the next words you are writing. ChatGPT writes your entire paper, then rewrites it based on your suggestions. You sometimes have to fight it to incorporate your ideas. It will sometimes stubbornly stick to its plan and perspective. A board full of lawyers would treat this like some open question, but it’s not. The kids know they’re cheating and taking steps to avoid detection. You’ll start seeing class policies explicitly prohibiting this kind of stuff anyway.
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The AI writes something original. It’ll even cite sources. There’s no original paper or collage of link-filled Wikipedia and Buzzfeed articles to present as evidence. The only evidence is the telltale signs of AI writing, which is obvious, but hard to articulate. TurnItIn is developing a tool that claims to detect AI writing, and there are already lots of them out there, but it’s a bit of a black box. With normal plagiarism detectors, it finds the sources so you can track it down and determine whether or not plagiarism actually occurred. The detector is just a tool to gather the evidence. The new AI detectors just tell you the likelihood that something was written by a bot. They don’t present evidence; it’s more of a, “trust us, that kid is 92.5% cheating, but we won’t tell you why we determined that” type thing.
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Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
I get that this is a take down of conservative, R, America first Christianity, and I have no disagreement with the assessment. It’s worth pointing out that there’s a fair amount of biblical precedent and support for the idea that such an ungodly person could lead God’s people astray. The Christian believer should be on the lookout for such movements. It’s the main theme of about half of the Old Testament and the New Testament is full of warnings about such a type of person. The Trump era has been a real challenge to my faith. That seems to be a common theme in this thread. Watching people I love and respect turn to cruelty and selfishness — and calling it the Gospel — has been a lot to take in. The change from apolitical people tirelessly serving marginalized groups to ungodly political tribalism hurting the same people they once served has been wild. As my wife said a few years ago, “how did all of our old friends turn into assholes?” These weren’t the people we knew.- 648 replies
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I’m on my college’s academic appeals committee. We’ve had our first batch of AI-based violations. Those AI-assisted papers are pretty easy to spot, even without the tools. They’re impeccably written, sound exceptionally smart on the surface yet never really get to the point (talking about the question rather than actually answering the question), and are riddled with made up stuff. Getting a committee to agree to sanction the student is a bit trickier than spotting the obvious cheater, at least so far on my campus. Policies and paper procedures will be radically changing over the next few years. So far, most of my colleagues have talked about returning to hand-written, blue book essays, or using North Korean styled proctoring services even for term papers. I’ve been playing with the idea of all or nothing, public, oral defenses of all term papers the last week of class. I may not be able to get the cheater past the appeals committee, but I can still wring out a zero on the paper and a little bit of public shame.
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That would be my interpretation as well, but “paying an undercover detective to have sex with a 14 year old child” leaves things pretty ambiguous.
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Obviously a terrible crime, but can we take a moment to acknowledge the abomination that is the tweet? Who was going to have sex with the child? The filmmaker or the cop? Why would you give money to a cop and tell them, “buy you something nice and also commit a sex crime?”
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Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
Theist or not, if you find yourself posting long cats that aren’t in plain text, it might be time to reexamine your worldview and consider who or what is leading you to make these terrible lifestyle choices. Posts read in dark mode and I comprehended it not. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
Everyone. I’m not saying the “American is a Christian nation” nonsense, but biblical illiteracy is cultural and historical illiteracy. We’re in a weird time where ignorance is somehow proclaimed honorable and in some cases a perverted shibboleth for the educated. -
Religion, weaponized religion, and the separation of church and state
Mole replied to Patricio Swayze's topic in Cloak Room
The issue of the proper response of the non-fascist part of America Christianity has been brought up. Since this so much of this board claimed to be reformed Bush republicans, I presume that a good number of this board was saying the same stuff about moderate Muslims during the height of the War on Terror. It can be a fair question to ask, but as we saw during the anti-Muslim fervor, it’s a short walk from fair questions to naked bigotry. Regarding the core issue raised, I deeply resent what this movement has done to both my country and the church. I’m pretty conservative theologically, and in my view, this false gospel is damaging the mission of the church even more than the country. Mixing religion and government damages both. I’m not sure how it can be fixed. There’s a social phenomenon that can happens in certain churches. I call it faith chicken, where the more extreme view, the view in need of more faith to believe, becomes the default view by virtue of the social need to appear faithful. I haven’t witnessed this in every church, or even most churches, but I think this plays a role in what’s happening in certain groups. It’s self-reinforcing madness. Regarding the role of religion in our society, we’re largely biblically illiterate these days — believer and non-believer alike. Even those that can drop a timely verse are often filtering it through a very narrow theological background. That’s a shame not only for the church, but also everyone’s ability to engage with our history and culture. The non-believer is missing out on the richness of so much of the important works of our culture; the believer misses out on the same richness of the world but has also replaced their faith with a caricature. Everyone would be well-served with at least one good, deep pass through the Bible — not to find something to dunk on your political enemies, engage in the culture war, or even come to faith, but to just understand what’s in it. It’s an amazing peek into the thinking of our ancient past as well as the framework for so much that came after it. -
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I kept waiting for the gotcha with the pudding incident and was left wanting. I see nothing wrong with commitment to the snack pack. For me at least, it goes on the pro side of the pro/con ledger.
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Duke, Auburn, TCU, NC State, Providence, USC, VCU, Boise St.
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I nominate ROFL BOX to keep the 20k safe.
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The destruction of America's public education system
Mole replied to Captainant's topic in Cloak Room
We homeschool our kid. Some families that homeschool love to talk curriculum. One family that we are close with has used ABEKA at least in part, so they showed us some of the materials. I looked through them with great care and interest and an open mind. The thought of educating my child with that nonsense broke my heart. It was horrifying — not because of its religious-based worldview — but because it was preposterously dumbed down. It is whatever you call the opposite of education. It’s easy to get wrapped up in what facts are taught and miss the bigger picture of what an education is. Education should of course get the basic facts right, but there are more important issues. ABEKA sucks because it condescends to the child. Whether it’s worldview is grounded in reality or a modern fundamentalist fantasy is mostly irrelevant. Even if the particular biblical interpretation behind their materials were 100% accurate to reality, ABEKA would still be the worst. -
Anger with God is the subject of many of the Psalms as well. Psalm 10: Why, Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? In his arrogance the wicked man hunts down the weak, who are caught in the schemes he devises. He boasts about the cravings of his heart; he blesses the greedy and reviles the Lord.
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A few semi-related and possibly contradictory points: 1. For some time, my hope has been a wave of repentance to sweep through the American church. Both personal repentance and corporate repentance. What a thing it would be to honestly see the harm I’ve personally caused and to change my life? And if that happened on a large scale? And then, what a thing it would be for churches to do the same — to reflect on the harm we’ve caused and change? Everyone has a different idea of what we need to repentant from, and it’s usually mostly about what someone else or some other church needs to turn from — “they’re” too hateful, “they’ve” strayed from sound doctrine, but what would happen if Christians actually considered their own sins and their collective sins rather than the sins of others? Something about the log and the speck, or maybe straining out gnats. If the gospel is true, all of it — the redemption and a spiritual enemy trying to undermine it — then surely the greatest way to undermine it is to turn Christians into selfish and self-righteous people no witness. The only way to combat that is massive and widespread repentance. 2. That being said, there’s a bit of an impossible situation here. Any movement or idea that gains enough traction will attract grifters and cynics. Take any movement that you support; the other side loves to point all of the hypocrisy because this or that shady person. Of course the grifters and Christian nationalists will try to glom onto this. That doesn’t negate what may be happening any more than any other movement. That the Christian nationalists are trying to make this about themselves doesn’t mean the moment isn’t valid or that it’s being crushed. It’s just the typical noise found with any cultural phenomenon. They may be noisy, and they surely cause outsized harm, but they are still small and unimportant. 3. I appreciate how it seems like the Asbury leadership has handled this. Give space for it to happen, but keep it mostly for the kids. We need their voice. For as much as people complain about Gen Z, I’m a fan. They might just be the antidote to our present day madness.
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Having watched their president speak at one of their services after this all started, he seems to be doing this for the right reasons. He seems like a humble, decent man. They are handling this as well as could be expected. I’ve seen a few things where the nationalists have tried to use this, but nothing suggesting that they are actually involved in any meaningful way — just some sad sacks from a distance shouting, “look at me!” That’s to be expected, even with a genuine movement, and it shouldn’t detract from what’s happening. Perhaps the revival will lead the nationalists to repent from their wicked ideology? Or maybe God has already give them over to a depraved mind. I get that “Jesus save America” has become the Christian nationalist thing, but it’s also pretty common among the rest of Christians. You don’t have to be a believer to recognize that our culture is deeply broken. There may be disagreements on what are the broken parts (the non-believers are more often right imo), but we all know that something is wrong. If you believe that Jesus transforms hearts and minds, it seems like spiritual revival would be a good starting point — “Jesus, save America.” One problem with the nationalists is that they don’t actually believe that, so they use Jesus as a weapon for their own power. But hoping for a spiritual movement that will lead to Godly wisdom — pure, peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of good works — well, Jesus save America. Revival starts with repentance, so there’s your test on who is being spiritually transformed and who is cynically using this. Honestly, if we all took a few weeks off to sing songs together — even really terrible songs — and consider the needs of those around us we’d all be much better for it. If that’s all that happens here, that seems like a good thing.
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Now I want some secular humus.
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Different genre, century, country, and all, but it’s no doubt a song and certainly has no words:
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Westerburg was the first name that came to mind, but after thinking about it, my top 3 have to be Townes, Willie, and Stevie. The second name that came to mind was Victoria Williams. Her voice is an acquired taste — the female Neil Young — but her songs are beautiful.
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The destruction of America's public education system
Mole replied to Captainant's topic in Cloak Room
Pornographic is a stretch; maybe vaguely pornographic? Or just go with the classic term, dirty. I’m not up on today’s LGTBQ comic books — I’m a Richie Rich fan myself — but if the posted pages are representative, inclusion in any kind of modern canon seems to be a big stretch as well. It reads like a comic book version of Dawson’s Creek.
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